Introduction to Framing/Reframing

Introduction to Framing/Reframing by sleepingirl

Many hypnosis sources talk about and around the idea of “framing” -- largely relative to how we present information and the relationship between it and its context. We understand intuitively, perhaps, that the way something is framed can change the way that it is understood or processed. It stands to reason, then, that if we change the framing of something -- by “reframing” it -- we can change the experience. Let’s explore.

Introduction

We’ll be taking a page (or several) from NLP practitioner Robert Dilts in this chapter, synthesizing, adapting, and expanding on various sources but quite a bit from his book, “Sleight of Mouth.”

Robert Dilts:

• Attended UCSC with an interest in a wide variety of disciplines
• Decided to take some linguistics classes when studying political science and found himself in a lecture taught by John Grinder, who had just finished the first volume of “Structure of Magic” with Bandler
• Learned the Meta Model patterns from Grinder’s classes and applied them to politics; a departure from how it was exclusively used (therapeutically) at that time
• Met Bandler and joined the study group a year or two later, going on to effectively practice NLP as volunteer therapy and write extensively about it

Reframing has been a part of hypnosis and NLP discussion for a long time. In the classic NLP book “Frogs Into Princes”, the transcript of a 1970s workshop by Bandler and Grinder, there was a lot of attention given to this concept. It’s an important part of the therapeutic process as a whole -- giving a client the skills to be able to see events from different perspectives can be key to allowing someone to process an experience constructively. But of course, it’s useful outside of a therapeutic context as well; this is an idea that’s ripe for perversion.

What is a “Frame”?

We understand loosely what it means when we talk about a “frame of reference”: the point of view that we have, or the point of view that someone else might have. These perspectives change the way that we process an experience -- no matter what that experience is.

Quite literally, our experiences in the world can be boiled down to the actual physical and psychological ability to perceive what is happening to us -- our sensory inputs, filtered through our point of view. NLP makes a distinction between our “primary experience” -- this sensory experience, literally how we take in information from the world -- and our “secondary experience” -- the “maps” that we create; our verbal and symbolic understanding of the world. We also can consider that how we perceive events and experiences from outside us (externally) is different from how we produce experiences through thoughts, daydreams, fantasies (internally). Perhaps this is something worthwhile to explore conceptually in hypnosis.

Dilts writes, “A psychological ‘frame’ refers to a general focus or direction that provides an overall guidance for thoughts and actions during an interaction.” The frame is essentially the context for the experience. For example, if we are hypnotizing a partner, we are literally experiencing it through our senses -- how they look and sound, what we feel physically and emotionally about how they are responding to us, how they feel when we touch them, and maybe even how they smell or taste. The context has to do with our motivations, our beliefs, and our values -- why are we engaging with them? How are we viewing this interaction, and how does the way we feel about all the elements involved and our personal histories change the way that we see it, and thus experience it?

A natural consequence of having an experience leads us to look for meaning in it. This can be a conscious process, where we think about something that happened and try to discern how we feel about it and what it represents. But this is often also at least partially something that happens unconsciously, where we have gut feelings or make assumptions about the experience. In the example of hypnotizing a partner, we might think about how it makes us feel, what it means for our relationship, what it means for our perceived skill as a hypnotist or their perceived skill as a subject, how it aligns with or changes our likes and dislikes, and so much more.

Components of a Frame

Another way of thinking about how a frame works is that we understand an experience or event to be “relative” to our frame -- both when it happens as well as when we recall it at different times. If we accept NLP’s axiom we cannot have an objective experience of the world, then it stands to reason that our subjective experience is what truly defines the event -- and that changes relative to how we perceive it.

If we think of the physical interpretation of a frame, we can consider that it is something that places clear boundaries around something else. When we’re talking about how we frame an experience, whether it is how someone is framing something to themselves, or how we are framing a suggestion, this same idea applies. For example, if we suggest to someone, “That feeling of your eyes fluttering is such a good anchor for you to know that you’re going into trance,” we are framing their physical experience to be something positive and successful, and specifically within the understanding that we both want trance to happen. We have placed constraints on the way we talk about their experience -- “failing” isn’t a part of the frame, and we’re not mentioning other aspects that might be a part of it (like potential distraction).

Let’s look at some elements that affect what defines a psychological frame:

• Time: A context of “when” someone is processing an experience.
  • What is the difference between processing an experience through the context of being in the exact moment, as opposed to thinking about something that will happen, or has already happened? How much time is between “now” and that event?
  • For example, thinking about going deeper into trance has a certain connotation in the exact moment it’s happening (like immediacy, desire, or hesitancy), whereas thinking about that as something that will happen (longing, anticipation, curiosity) or something that has already happened (nostalgia, forgetfulness, strength of sense memory). Consider that telling someone that they are “about” to experience something adds an element of anticipation or precipice, as opposed to telling them that they “are” experiencing something. There are many other factors or feelings that could be tied to a “time frame” based on context, as well.
• Good vs Bad: Whether someone perceives an event as positive or negative, successful or unsuccessful, etc.
  • Is someone processing an experience from the perspective of it being a successful experience, or unsuccessful? Was it supposed to happen, did they do the right thing, was it productive?
  • For example, if someone feels the need to move their body in trance to get more comfortable, are they seeing that as a “failure” -- they felt like they needed to bring themselves up and broke trance, or that they “shouldn’t need to move”? Or are they seeing it as a positive thing -- “It’s an opportunity for me to refocus”, “It’s productive to my trance since I’ll be able to go deeper.”
• Who: Is someone seeing an experience through their own eyes, or from someone else’s perspective?
  • Sometimes, people make judgments about their actions or events through how they perceive others to feel about it. Are they thinking about how their partner is interpreting their experience, or maybe how society as a whole (or corners of it) would look at it?
  • For example, if someone goes into trance only moments into when you are starting to hypnotize themselves, are they having any thoughts about how you might see that? Are they worried you’ll think they’re too easy, or do they think it would excite you? Are they thinking about how the hypnosis community perceives subjects who go into trance quickly, and using that to filter their experience? Or are they purely thinking about their experience from their own perspective? How could you direct them to think from any of these points of view, and how would that change their experience?

This is just a handful of parameters that might apply to someone’s frame of reference -- we’re going to explore a couple more of some ideas that are more encompassing. But even just from these specific aspects you might be able to see how they are deeply contextual, and can inform the entirety of an experience beyond just what we’ve mentioned here.

Logical Levels

One concept that will help us understand more about what gives shape to a frame is something else that Robert Dilts had a hand in influencing within NLP: “Logical Levels”. The idea comes initially from Gregory Bateson (who was associated with Erickson as well as the early Meta Group, and known for his research on double binds). He posited that there are different “levels” of ways that experiences/thoughts/things exist; the notion of a “flower” being of a higher logical level than a Grandiflora rose -- a category being “higher” than its members. This shares the same sort of idea as chunking information and understanding meta levels, which we’ve discussed previously, and has been applied to many different ideas about communication and learning.

This concept was clarified and adapted by Dilts (and is sometimes referred to in NLP as “NeuroLogical Levels”) to talk about what is essentially the question of, “How close is this information to me, personally?” Telling someone, “What you did was hot” can have a very different feeling than telling them, “You are hot,” for example. Let’s take a look at how Dilts breaks down this hierarchy, sometimes referring to it as the “ABCs” of NLP:

• A. Who I Am: Who are you?
  • This is a person’s identity, their sense of self, as “close” as you can possibly get to someone.
  • “You are sexy.”
• B. My Beliefs: Why do you/did you do/feel x?
  • This is discussing a person’s values, the reasons behind their actions, one step away from their “self.”
  • “The reason why you go into trance is sexy.”
• C. My Capabilities: How do you/did you do x?
  • This is a person’s ability and methods for their actions/thoughts, further “up” or away from them.
  • “The ways that make you able to go into trance are sexy.”
• D. What I Do/Have Done: What do you/did you do?
  • This is looking at a person’s actions specifically, even more separated.
  • “Going into trance is sexy.”
• E. My Environment: Where/When do you/did you do/feel x?
  • This is even higher away from a person, their surroundings, the things that describe where and when they are that their actions/thoughts are happening.
  • “This moment in which you’re going into trance is sexy.”

As you can see, each of these levels is at a higher category than the previous one; higher levels “contain” the parts of the lower levels (like members of a category). There is a feeling of ideas becoming more personal as they get closer to the lowest level, and less personal as they get further away. We can also understand that these categories have relationships with each other; often, if someone makes a comment about something that we do, we might “take it personally”, for better or for worse assuming that it is commentary about who we are. Likewise, if someone talks about us as a person, we might ask ourselves, “What does that mean about my behavior or beliefs?” although this may not be as direct.

We can also see how this might be relevant hypnotically; suggesting something to someone or telling them about an aspect of them or their behavior changes depending on which level we are speaking in. We can conceptualize this as an aspect of framing: which frame of reference are we playing in, how close to the person are we getting? For this reason, this idea of logical or meta level is another quality that changes our frame:

• Meta/Logical Level: How “close” is the person to the experience/suggestion.
• You can think of this as a metaphorical “where is the experience/suggestion, relative to them?” Is it something that they are very detached from, or something that feels very personal? How does that affect the way that they feel about it?
• For example, if you are making objectifying commentary to someone, what choices are available to you to make those suggestions? “This is the perfect place for an object to be”, “You are acting exactly like a doll,” “Your thoughts are just object thoughts,” “You are an object.” How do those change the feelings and implications? (Notice that there might be something to the idea of being thorough and addressing all of these levels, and that the very most “direct” statement of “You are x” might be best saved for when the subject is already experiencing some of the other feelings.)

What is Reframing?

Even by nature of talking about how we frame suggestions and experiences (to ourselves and to each other), we are starting to get into the idea of reframing something: changing the frame and context. Reframing something is to purposefully change the reference point or aspects of the way that someone understands something, which ultimately changes its meaning and the way that someone processes it.

In a therapeutic context, reframing is a tool to be able to get a better perspective on something, more broad or from a different point of view, usually taking a “bad” thing and reframing it to be “good.” Our hypnokink model is not about helping or healing someone, so we can generally think of this more as taking something from “good” to “better”, or from one perspective to another, or even as sadistic as from “good” to “bad.” All of these can be applicable to us in different scenarios.

For example, two partners might be engaging in a hypnosis scene together, one of their play dates that they get regularly. They are both excited for it, but the hypnotist might want to add some extra “oomph” to it, and reframes it: “We’re so used to getting time with each other, but when you really think about it, we’re so lucky that this is something that we’re able to have. Did you ever think that you’d get to go into such profound trance so often? That you’d be so weak to it?” Notice the elements we’ve discussed here: the hypnotist is changing the time frame -- they’re taking the subject from being within the frame of “hypnosis is a regular thing in my life” to remembering a time when it wasn’t, and getting them to process the experience from that perspective. Also, the comment about “weakness” is a way of remarking positively on their capabilities in sexy disguise, getting them to think about how good they are at trance (moving to that logical level) and framing that as a hot thing. They’re taking an already fun experience and making it feel more significant.

Dilts writes, “The heart of reframing is to make the distinction between the intention [...] and the behavior.” We can think about this as the ability for us to take any action or experience and apply nearly any kind of perceived intention or context to it in order to change the way it feels. If a frame has to do with the meaning of something, then when we change the frame, it changes the meaning. Essentially, reframing an experience or suggestion allows us to make it feel or mean almost anything we want, just by nature of changing the perspective.

Simple Reframing Skills / Tools

Understanding the different components of a frame allows us to fiddle with them to change the meaning of an experience. It is a good habit to get into to start thinking about what frame of reference someone is looking through to feel the way they do, and thinking about the categories we’ve talked about so far (time, good vs bad, who, and meta/logical level) when considering someone’s perspective is helpful. There are of course many more attributes that we could come up with that define someone’s point of view, and it’s also good practice to think about what those could be.

But when it comes to specific skills and tools to reframe something, we have a number of ways that we can explain this process. Thus far, we’ve talked about reframing as a holistic process; something where we look at the whole of a situation and think about changing abstract parts within. In this section, we’ll look at some linguistic tricks we can use to achieve this. Let’s take a look:

• Conjunction reframe
  • A conjunction in English grammar is a word that connects sentences, phrases, clauses, or words. “And,” “but,” “although,” “while,” “so,” and “even though” are examples of these kinds of words. Swapping one conjunction for another can subtly or drastically change the meaning (framing) of a suggestion.
  • For example, if we say, “You’re noticing your heavy body, and you’re also noticing my voice filling your head,” we can see that the “and” here serves to equate these two sensations; they both have similar weight. If we change it: “You’re noticing your heavy body, but you’re also noticing my voice filling your head,” we can see that the “but” brings the second part of the suggestion to the foreground, leading away from the first part. This might be useful when we are transitioning from one aspect of a scene to another and want to emphasize the part we are leading to. Try swapping to different conjunctions and seeing how that changes the “feeling” of different suggestions.
• One word reframe
  • In this technique, we take a single word out of a sentence (usually something descriptive), and think about what we consider to be synonyms of that word. Then, we substitute one of those synonyms for the original word and take note of how that changes the meaning as a whole. Synonyms are never perfect matches; by the nature of our language, different words have different connotations, and further are influenced by the context around it (the rest of the sentence).
  • For example, if our partner says to us that they are feeling “a little nervous” (in a fun or not-obstructive way), or this is something that we infer from their behavior, we can take a moment to think of a bunch of other words associated with “nervous.” “Anticipatory,” “tense,” “shy,” “fearful,” or even “excited” might come to mind, and notice that swapping any one of our synonyms changes the framing/meaning of what they are experiencing, and we could go in a variety of different directions with that. We might say something like, “So that means you’re just anticipating what’s coming, right?” to reframe it as more neutral or positive, or we could even say, “Oh, are you feeling scared?” to intimidate them in a playful way. You can also chain these together, going from one to another: “Feeling nervous? Doesn’t that just mean that you’re anticipating what’s coming next? Because you’re excited about it? Isn’t that thrilling?” Each step slowly changes the frame, so you can end with a very different meaning from where you started.
• Comparison/similarity reframe
  • This is a skill we can use when we want to change the framing/meaning of an experience or suggestion, or transition to something different, and it can be particularly useful for more drastic changes. It involves having some understanding of the current frame and the frame you want to go to. Then, you consider components of both -- making comparisons and essentially reframing each one until you come up with two attributes or frames that are related to each other, thus making it easier to go from one to the other.
  • For example, let’s look at a “sadistic” reframe. Consider that many times in hypnokink, we’re looking for the experience of being taken advantage of, of feeling overpowered or even forced. However, we are necessarily approaching hypnosis in play as a consensual experience, so how can we change that perspective? Some attributes of a consensual hypnosis frame might be “consent,” “care,” “attention,” “respect,” “enjoyment,” “letting go,” “excitement,” “obedience,” and/or “permission” (among many others depending on context). Some attributes of a “forced” frame might be “weakness,” “resistance,” “obedience,” “surrender,” “losing,” “manipulated,” “violation,” “loss of control,” and/or “excitement.” Notice already that there can be some overlap, and think about what those overlaps are, and how you would relate the two frames if you were talking about it: “Doesn’t the care I’m giving you feel a little dark? Isn’t your excitement kind of betraying you, how weak you are to this?” You don’t necessarily need to explicitly state the frame that you’re starting in; sometimes it’s good to directly connect the dots for someone, especially if this is a situation that calls for it, but oftentimes you can rely on the starting frame being known (since it is the frame of reference they are in). Consider that you may not know exactly what their perspective is, so it is more ambiguous to just work with talking about the frame you want to get to, and leave the connection implied.

Article Summary

• Robert Dilts was an influential person in this corner of NLP
• A “frame” is the context surrounding an experience or suggestion, which ultimately influences its perceived meaning
• There are a few general components that describe some (but certainly not all) aspects to a psychological frame, such as time, whether it’s thought to be good or bad, and whose perspective it is
• “Logical levels,” or the idea of how close a piece of information/suggestion is to someone, gives us another opportunity to consider how something is framed
• Reframing is about changing a frame in order to change the meaning of an experience/suggestion
• There are a few simple ways of doing this linguistically: with conjunctions, single word synonyms, or finding overlapping criteria

Bibliography

Dilts, R. (1999). Sleight of Mouth: The Magic of Conversational Belief Change. Scotts Valley, CA: Dilts Strategy Group.

Dilts, R. (2014). A Brief History of Logical Levels. Retrieved March 19, 2021, from http://www.nlpu.com/Articles/LevelsSummary.htm

Hall, M. (2010, February 09). Is There Any Difference Between Logical Levels and Logical Types? Retrieved March 19, 2021, from https://www.neurosemantics.com/is-there-any-difference-between-logical-levels-and-logical-types/